Though it's not mentioned there, the big difference is that Greenspun was talking about squeezing the last drop of productivity from pretty well paid programmers. And with appropriate bumps in salary to go with that extra productivity.
Calacanis is apparently talking about people making $35k a year, in LA.
(After Calacanis edited his post)... As long as it's a decent wage and it's the sort of stuff I want to be doing, I would be happy to have a workplace like that.
OS X, dual monitors, good chairs, free lunch, no getting shoehorned into MS Office or Exchange email, no phone system... sounds great!
Michael Arrington is his own boss, as far as I know, so he chooses to do that. Choosing not to take a vacation rather than being forced not to by a boss is different.
Not taking a vacation, furthermore, is quite a different thing from having a job that is essentially a neverending death march.
Did pg "have a life" when starting viaweb? If I recall correctly he was arguing in favor of work 10x harder for 4 years instead of working for 40 years at normal velocity.
Which is why nobody was arguing to fire employees that are not workaholics in your stable and profitable company. Everyone was talking about startups where hopefully all of your employees have a decent amount of equity.
There are stable jobs at IBM, Microsoft, 37 Signals and Fog Creek Software for those that need work life balance.
http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-softwar...